The bronze age and the Celtic world / by Harold Peake.

  • Harold John Edward Peake
Date:
1922
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The bronze age and the Celtic world / by Harold Peake. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    64/244 (page 60)
    Time will show whether the suggestion, which I have put forward, that the Prospectors, who seem to have been responsible for introducing the use of metal into the west and north, to which they came in search of precious ores, started originally from the Persian Gulf, or whether, indeed they were but sojourners in southern Mesopotamia, having arrived there by sea from some more distant land, bringing with them the seeds of civilisation, as the legends of Oannes, the exalted fish-man, as given by Berosus, seem to indicates.48 Be this as it may, there seems to be adequate evidence of a trade, starting in the eastern Mediterranean and going first to Malta and Sicily, and thence to Spain, Brittany, the British Isles and the Baltic. That the prime object of such trade was the procuring of gold, copper, tin and amber, seems equally certain, as does the fact that megalithic monuments are found associated with all the sites whence these commodities could be obtained, as well as upon the land routes connecting them. Further, a certain type of man, whom we term the Prospector, is found living in no small numbers in most of these megalithic areas, as well as becoming a successful merchant at many of the sea-port towns of Europe. Lastly we have seen that this trade, then in the hands of Babylonians, had reached the Mediterranean by 2800 b.c., was in touch with Malta, Sicily and Spain between 2600 and 2300 b.c., and scarcely later had reached Brittany, Ireland and the Baltic. Thus it seems clear that the Prospectors, in search of metal, reached Celtic lands, where their descendants may yet be found. What language they spoke is uncertain ; it may have been allied to Etruscan or to Sumerian. But judging from their cosmopolitan habits, one may surmise that they were polyglot, and adopted the language of the country in which they settled. We can, then, hardly expect to detect any survivals of the Prospector tongue in the modern Celtic languages, unless undeed it be some loan words connected with the metal trade. 48 King (1910) 53.